The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
There are two types of keyword search:
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 792 contributions
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 9 October 2024
Lorna Slater
Thank you. We have touched slightly on my next question, but I will elaborate on it. The second PFG priority is growing our economy. I have a question about what that means, because economic growth can be associated with increased inequality—letting the rich get richer—and it can be associated with trashing the environment. Both of those things will give you great GDP figures, but they do not lead to the wellbeing economy that we claim to want.
The update to the national performance framework and the new proposed national outcomes was a good bit of work—I support that. It included community engagement and it talked about public transport—the things that we need to do. How do you square the full charge for economic growth, which can cause environmental havoc and inequality, with measuring our success on the proposed national outcomes, which are based very much on a wellbeing economy? Those feel like two different things. You are measuring one thing while trying to achieve another.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 9 October 2024
Lorna Slater
I get that it is to bring us in line with the UK. I am just curious as to whether there is any current provision by those countries that would therefore be terminated or not be able to be renewed. What is meant by “certain health care services”? Maybe you could write to me about that.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 9 October 2024
Lorna Slater
I want to understand this clearly. Are any healthcare services being provided in Scotland by the countries that are being removed—Georgia, Albania, Kosovo, Moldova, North Macedonia and Ukraine? The instrument says that it removes those countries’ access to bidding for procurement of “certain health care services”. What kind of healthcare services are those?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 9 October 2024
Lorna Slater
The cabinet secretary will know that I think that a good green industrial strategy is very important in setting out Scotland as a place for investment in key sectors as we move forward in the just transition. However, I have noticed an area of incoherence between the national strategy for economic transformation and the green industrial strategy. I hope that the cabinet secretary can elaborate and tell us how she is going to align those strategies.
The NSET includes a list of 14 opportunities, which is quite a long bullet list, and many of those have a sub-list. That does not come across as very strategic but as a massive shopping list. It is wonderful that Scotland has so many opportunities, but that is not a strategic approach. It makes sense that the green industrial strategy is a shorter list, but that shorter list is not a subset of what is in the NSET. Two things that are in the green industrial strategy do not appear in the NSET at all. One is carbon capture, utilisation and storage, and the other is energy-intensive industry stuff, which includes chemicals, paper and steel. Those are all great industries, but neither CCUS nor those energy-intensive industries were identified in the NSET as opportunities. How come they have suddenly appeared out of nowhere, as it were, in the green industrial strategy as key opportunities? What evidence was used to generate the opportunities in the green industrial strategy versus those in the NSET? How are we supposed to know what our strategic priorities are when we have two disparate lists?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 9 October 2024
Lorna Slater
The difficulty is, when the goal is growth, as it is in the PFG, that gives no reassurance that growth will not be just the pursuit of maximising GDP while causing negative outcomes elsewhere.
It is misleading to say that our goal is growth, given that, as the cabinet secretary has set out, our goal is a wellbeing economy, in which people’s lives are improved, communities are strengthened and businesses are safe to invest. That might mean that GDP comes down a couple of notches, because we need to redistribute wealth or to invest more in public services. It is important to be clear on whether we are going after a wellbeing economy rather than maximising a single metric no matter what the cost to society.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 2 October 2024
Lorna Slater
Just to make sure that I have understood, can you confirm whether the UK, of all the countries on the list, had the lowest provision of childcare?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 2 October 2024
Lorna Slater
I am also a member of Unite the union.
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 2 October 2024
Lorna Slater
I should probably disclose that my husband was on a zero-hours contract for several years, so I am aware of the sharp end of that. Thank you very much for that.
My next question relates, slightly, to the barrier between reserved and devolved powers. How did the UK and Scotland compare with the other countries on the list with regard to childcare provision, and how much do you think that that affects the data?
10:00Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 2 October 2024
Lorna Slater
Okay. I just noticed that, when we averaged it out, England was at the bottom of the table. It is an interesting comparison and shows how the Scottish Government is trying to balance things in an upwards direction.
For my last question, I want to change the topic slightly and look at workers in rural areas. It is an issue on which we have done some work, but I am interested in your work on it, too. I note that the hospitality inquiry report highlighted the challenges facing hospitality workers, particularly when housing is provided as part of their job. I am aware from my previous role that that is also a challenge in the agriculture sector, where workers, gamekeepers and so on are often housed as part of their job. When we looked at putting in place conditionality with regard to Scottish Government grant funding and attaching it to the real living wage, we found that the agriculture sector was struggling in that respect. I am therefore interested in hearing about the issues for rural workers, particularly with regard to being paid the living wage and other aspects of fair work. What are the conditions like now for rural workers and what can we do to improve them?
Economy and Fair Work Committee
Meeting date: 2 October 2024
Lorna Slater
Colin Smyth has highlighted very well one of the examples of powers that are reserved and not part of the devolved settlement. I will pick into another one. Helen Martin made the point, and I am worried about it as well, that the use of zero-hours contracts is significantly up from 2016. I would like to hear why that is. Why are zero-hours contracts a problem and what can be done? It would be useful to know what can be done in a devolved sense, because we are here to hold the Scottish Government to account, but it is often sometimes useful to know what is reserved.